It's so odd to me that all the youngsters around today were never aware of the 'threat' of the 'net pc' or whatever. Plus many old timers have forgotten. It really makes the all the linux/windows wars seem trite.

A distributed office suite over the internet would be one hell of a shot across MS bows.

A distributed office suite over the internet would be one hell of a shot across MS bows.

Several have been working and heading toward a gold release for last 12 months, at least 1 major free one based on OO, and at lest one commercial one based on OO, both serious.

Quote

Could it be browser based even today?

Easily. I've done the parts myself before (used to specialise in this kind of thing), it's just a lot of work to get the whole together, and been waiting for various API's to iron out their bigger bugs.

"Under the agreement, Sun will include the Google Toolbar as an option in its consumer downloads of the Java Runtime Environment on http://java.com. In addition, the companies have agreed to explore opportunities to promote and enhance Sun technologies, like the Java Runtime Environment and the OpenOffice.org productivity suite."

Tumbleweed, tolling bell, cackling old lady on deserted veranda...

And is it my imagination or has the JRE just grown a little bit bigger again with some cruft we don't want?

Easily. I've done the parts myself before (used to specialise in this kind of thing), it's just a lot of work to get the whole together, and been waiting for various API's to iron out their bigger bugs.

Let's pray it never happens. Browser-based "applications" suck universally. Anything beyond a simple form in a browser is quite likely to be garbage. Though Google seems to be pretty good at pushing the limits, the browser is a horrible tool to implemment anything like an office suite. I'm sure it will be attempted though... and the browsers will be extended to do all sorts of things that they should just never touch. The end result will be a massive proliferation of security vulnerabilities and crappy "web" apps that never work right (or well).

It's hard enough just to get people to fix the browsers to render a simple chunk of HTML correctly. Now people want to make them all into some twisted VM with XML as the language? Keep apps out of the browser. Use the right tool for the job. (Web Start anyone?)

I agree here for the most part, but on the other hand, Google seems really good at getting high-interactivity interfaces into a browser.The GMail interface is excellent, as is the Google home page. Click on "Personalise your Google homepage", and then drag each of the components around, marvelling at how it all happens in an intelligent, non-reloading way.So if anyone can do it, Google can.

The funny thing is, Ajax is just a load of rubbish compared even to Flash. All of this stuff is rubbish compared to Flash in fact.

Cas

(as someone who is very heavily using AJAX) that's - IMO - rubbish.

AJAX needs no client

AJAX works on *every* browser, even mac-IE, even Safari

AJAX has no big download

AJAX only requires you know how to write HTML+CSS

AJAX has low memory requirements

AJAX does NOT force you to use a complete piece-of-sh** server thats useless for everything - it's just plain old (X)HTML.

...just for starters.

PS: when I said this was all done before and/or being done, I meant the INTELLIGENT integration of document editing into HTML browsers, not using special clients and VM's. You can do a lot with a word document whose native file-format is XML (this is how OO stores word docs), especially when you have smart pipelines set up for auto-export to PDF, PNG, etc - and can use simple WYSIWYG editors to do editing to the same level of quality as a moderate word-processor *and* using AJAX you have autosave.

I have a spec sitting on my desk for doing an offline version, that will work for people with laptops who keep disconnecting and reconnecting to the corporate VPN. Looks like it will work great, it's just a question of whether we have the time to implement it, or if an off-the-shelf alternative becomes avaialble soon enough we dont need to.

Just look at the little bit of source it's easy to see. It's just a toy. The browsers that support this stuff are bloody heavyweight monsters and largely full of crashing bugs. Give me a JVM any day.

You mean, the only web browsers available?

And when you have a full GUI library that is as expressively powerful as XHTML (forget CSS for now), please let me know. Won't be much use until you add something as good as CSS/2, but still, it would be a start.

You should be comparing what the browser does more than anything else (layout + rendering) to an equivalent in the JVM, seeing as that's a major part of what this is about, not ignoring it.

And for all the browser based app haters on here, here is a choice quote...

"And as more folks realize the deficiencies of a "submit button internet," Java's role is only growing."

Here's one from a friend last week: "it took me 30 minutes to write a graphical game from scratch using AJAX in the browser, because I got to spend all that time writing code, and none of it [messing] about with working with GUI API's".

HTML+CSS+AJAX is much much quicker to write good UI's in than any standard GUI API I've ever seen. Developers flock to it because it increases productivity. This will continue so long as platforms like java have such poor GUI API's. Browser development is overcoming the problems of using a browser much much faster than Sun is overcoming the crapness of their API...

How can you judge the beauty of something that's not about graphics, but about asynchronous communication with the server? And it's not about application logic either, as swpalmer said, the logic stays on the server (that may run a JVM too). AJAX is simply about sending and receiving data asynchronously, nothing more or less.

Also, don't underestimate the power of HTML+CSS. There are lots of applications that couldn't be built with it, but there are also a lot that could and will be in the future.

What was wrong with applets exactly? They promised to do all this stuff but for some mysterious reason it didn't work out that way (ah, wasn't it something to do with Microsoft?)

Just think about it for a moment. An applet that was simply an object covering the entire page would give the entire power of a Java client at its disposal. But for some reason this mickey mouse HTML+CSS travesty is the current buzz. Just look at the code and think about maintenance for a minute.

It might conceivably help if Java had an HTML4.0 renderer in Swing too of course

See, it all comes down to that "distribution of the JVM" problem again... Imagine if that JVM had been small enough to embed in Firefox what the situation would have been like today. Or built in to IE supplied in XP SP3 or Windows Update. But no, instead some daft new thing has come along before the original idea has even had a chance.

What is the situation with JRE distribution nowadays anyway? Anyone got some numbers?My feeling is that it is much much better than before. On the old JEmu a few years ago I got *lots* of complaints that it didn't work because they didn't have a recent JRE (1.3 at the time). Now I get quite a lot of feedback on JEmu2, yet only one complained that it didn't work because of a JRE installation problem (and that one was on Linux, btw). Maybe this doesn't prove anything, therefor I'm quite interested in numbers.

java-gaming.org is not responsible for the content posted by its members, including references to external websites,
and other references that may or may not have a relation with our primarily
gaming and game production oriented community.
inquiries and complaints can be sent via email to the info‑account of the
company managing the website of java‑gaming.org